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Kjel Knutsson
The site as a sacred place
Artefacts, their production and use obviously have a strong symbolic and
per, not only the material “sacred” remains of past events are important in
the construction of narratives explaining the world, but the landscape in
which they are situated. “Landscapes contain traces of past activities, and
people select the stories they tell, the memories and histories they evoke,
the interpretative narratives that they weave, to further their activities in the
No doubt the landscape in different ways has to be incorporated into the
life world and thus the narratives of groups in habiting that world. Perhaps
nies in New Guinea evoke powerful images of landscapes, paths and places
through which, as they harden in the course of the singing; “living people
in Ingold 1996:215 f). If this animated world was inside the heads of these
people, it must at the same time have served as a mnemonic device, bridging
the present with past events through material culture.
The built environment, the named and used landscape, is thus a break
to “ceaseless change” and might explain the long sequences of continuity
in material symbolism that we see in many prehistoric setting. But, as Lo
nt: “we lack their spontaneous and unselfconscious use of their own cultural
conventions” (Lowenthal In Ingold 1996:209). “…we can never fully enter
their perceptual world”. That is as a past that is with us. “Nothing repli
cates the past as it was for those who lived it as their present” (ibid:209f).
None of us doubts that “people select the stories they tell”, the narrative is
written from the historical position of the writer, but, as I will argue, there
are constraints, constraints activated through the ”discriminant judgement
of the (perceptually) skilled practioner” (Ingold 1996:48). The landscape is
always in a dialogue between the historical present and historical/mythical
narratives represented in and carried by sacred places and relics.
I have already pointed out the drive for meaning that is triggered as re
production for some reason fails. History as a past before us is activated in
these circumstances. Not only archaeology but sociology was established as
an answer to the same type of cognitive insecurity that characterizes these
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